Help! Moist Wood In South Florida!

[tom di]

We just received our new beehive pizza oven and are very frustrated!

It seems it is more difficult to find wood here in South Florida that is not MOIST than I thought it would be! Does anyone in South Florida have any suggestions for us? Trying to find hard fruit or oak wood that has not been chemically treated, at a store, and dry seems impossible. Do you suggest we purchase oak at Home Depot? Yikes.

I will mention that I am secretly surprised that this will take a bit of skill to learn how to get the perfect wood, temp, ingred.... just to make one small tiny delicious pizza! I am so looking forward to that day when we "know" our oven and it's behavior in a more intimate way!

Let us know if you have any suggestions at krystldipace@comcast.net. Navigating through the forum seems a bit overwhelming to me at this moment.

Tom & Kryst'l

[fullback66]

Re: Help! Moist Wood In South Florida!

After you are done cooking. Put the next load of wood in the hot oven to dry it out. Watch out that it does not catch on fire.
fb66

[james]

Re: Help! Moist Wood In South Florida!

Hey Tom,
I don't think there is anything more frustrating than wet wood. We had a delivery a few years ago that just wouldn't burn. We ended up calling it asbestos wood (I was convinced it was non combustible), and let it sit for a year before we came back to it. We arranged another delivery to take it's place in the meanwhile.

The good news is that when you have a nice load of dry wood -- the Primavera oven shoots up to cooking temperature. No problems.

If the wood isn't too terrible, Fullback66's idea also works. If it is really bad, you might call around for a half court (or less) of truly dry wood from a different company.

Let us know how it goes.
James